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I realized more than 20 years ago that a career in business didn't float my boat. I was on the corporate ladder as a management consultant but felt this perpetual discontentment. Then, I went to Belize in 1997 and it just blew me away. I backpacked, contracted malaria and ended up in Guatemala.
I understood then that there was a different way to look at the world. Growing up, I was always the guy with the little film camera taking pictures of my friends and playing around in the darkroom at school. So over time I transitioned from full-time to freelance consultancy work and started doing a lot of wildlife, travel and sports photography.
I have a good friend in Kenya who runs a safari company, so I've been going to Africa every year for 18 years. Then around five years ago I started doing more remote photography and that's when I moved to a level that realized my artistic ambition.
To do remote photography—where you trigger the camera to take shots while you are very close by—I have to go to places when it's quiet. Earlier this year I sat by myself for a week in a hide in Siberia, with no reception and very little electricity. It was -4°F outside and I was waiting to see Amur leopards. The range of this animal is around 10,000 football fields and I was in the middle of the forest, looking at one area of 75 meters squared, hoping they would walk past and feed on the deer I'd left. I had no joy on that occasion, but handling disappointment is part of it.
Caught between three angry bears
I always like to take a different approach with my work and go the extra mile—I really relish the challenge of creating genuinely unique images. For example, last year in Alaska I was supposed to go and photograph grizzly bears in Alaska as most people do—going to a lodge and getting on a sea plane to a nearby lake and hiking to a river. But I talked to a guide who I had become friends with and he suggested we do it another way.
We flew to Homer from Anchorage, then took a float plane to the Alaskan Peninsula where there are more bears than people. We camped in the wild with an electric fence around and we were hiking 15km every day in search of bears. It was unbelievable. I woke up one morning, there was ice in the tent, I looked out to see a mom grizzly bear and two of her cubs less than 100 meters away.
On that trip, the bears we wanted to work with were the biggest male bears in the river—they weren't looking for trouble and they weren't hungry because they had been eating salmon and berries.
We were getting really close to these bears and they're huge. Then, on our second day, we saw a couple of groups of people. After they walked past, I asked my guide, "why is it that all the other guides have got guns and bear spray and you carry a pebble?"
He explained that when a bear charges you, it doesn't know what is going to happen. If your first motion is half a step back, it reinforces that you should be chased. If a bear were to charge us, he explained that on his say-so we should take half a step forward, which is enough to disrupt the bear and make them think twice. If that doesn't work, he had a pebble and would throw it in the water. He was just trying to interrupt the bear with a passive distraction.
Shortly after, I was shooting photos on the opposite river bank to my guide. While I was sitting there, there was a mom with one cub and a fairly big male bear nearby. A mom will always be wary of being separated from her cub and of any male bear who could get aggressive and kill the cub. The cub had wandered off from mom and the male bear walked round the corner. All of a sudden, the mom goes bananas, the baby starts shouting, and the male freezes. Then everyone's going bananas and I'm literally triangulated right in the middle of these three bears.
Our guide was really mellow, but he stood up immediately and said, "Graeme, do exactly what I say!"—so I knew he meant business. He told me to stand up and not move, and clap three times loudly.
He explained afterwards that he knew the problem would be solved when the baby was back with the mom, and the best way to do that was to startle the baby a little so it ran back to her. These bears were ten metres away in three directions and all three bears were rattled. A rattled bear is completely unpredictable, and bears are fast—if bears start running, they may not see you and you might just get run over. Having a skilled guide who can diffuse situations is crucial when experiencing wildlife at close quarters.
Watching lions and seeing my camera crushed
I've photographed a lot of dangerous animals, including a pride of lions in Kenya who I have documented for almost 20 years. The Ridge Pride was a stable pride with two males, but one died and one was chased off.
Around three or four years ago, I started doing a lot of remote photography with that pride and had some amazing up close experiences, using my remote camera—lions coming up and touching the camera when I was 20 meters away.
The first time I did it, I put my camera on a tripod and the alpha lioness took it. We had to chase the lion who had my camera, and it got smashed. And when I went back to get the tripod and there was a cub sitting, proud as punch with my tripod in his mouth. So my closer relationship with the pride started back then.
But there was also a group of mature males in the area who were looking for trouble—we called them the "six boys."
I had spent a lot of time with these cubs. And then the "six boys" took over the pride, killed all nine cubs but one—who I haven't seen since —and the females were split up into the older and younger ones for a period of time. The goal for them was to kill the cubs, bring the females into heat and have their own cubs.
Roughly 10 percent of male lions make it into adulthood because it's so tough. The "six boys" wanted their own dynasty, but it was pretty brutal—the mating and the infighting between the six. It was very sad as well—these were cubs I had known and photographed and they were not going to grow up. Then, I went back in 2019 and for the first time I saw that all the new lion cubs were running around, I get goosebumps just thinking about it. It was fantastic.
Polar Bears, crocodiles and...local foxes
But I've learned you just don't get the best shots on your first trip. I have photographed polar bears before in Churchill, Canada—they are really dangerous, predatory animals. Now I'd like to go to Nunavut territory in Canada, go out in floe ice, find polar bears and leave cameras out for them to come up to. It's the wild of the wild, it's really dangerous and you need to arm yourself with guns and exercise extreme caution.
Before COVID-19 hit, I was supposed to go to Siberia for a month, and to India. But during lockdown I have gained something that was priceless to me—a deeper appreciation of the wildlife around me in London. I've been working on a project with my local fox and I've just recently seen that she's bringing her babies into the garden. For 40 nights I went out with a camera and captured more than 4,000 images of my local fox. Trips I've lost I can redo, but what I've gained is amazing.
For my first trip since the pandemic, I just visited a remote Mexican atoll and stayed in fisherman's huts. We slept in hammocks, there was no electricity and we snorkelled with crocodiles. These American crocodiles are big. They came up and their noses touched the front of my camera, while we were in chest height water—they're not 30 metres away, or in a cage.
This work has its dangers, but I never want to lose photography as an art. It's my art and I want to do it in a way that shows wildlife at its best
Graeme Purdy is a former management consultant who is now an international wildlife photographer. Graeme travels the world photographing dangerous wild animals at incredibly close-range. He has a fine art wildlife photography book called EIGHT FEET and actively collaborates with various conservation charities around the world. You can follow him on Instagram @graemepurdy.
All views expressed in this piece are the writer's own.
As told to Jenny Haward.
